


To the Healing Huts (Where You Belong)

by SomeLadyOnTheInternet



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: After season 1, Girls aren't the only ones who want to learn, Let the guys heal, Sequel to Element of Change, Yugoda is a good teacher and fine with this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:48:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22842013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeLadyOnTheInternet/pseuds/SomeLadyOnTheInternet
Summary: How a Northern Water Tribe boy starts learning about healing
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39





	To the Healing Huts (Where You Belong)

To the Healing Huts (Where You Belong)

Yugoda’s mornings never changed much. She would take a moment to admire the sunrise, then head inside and begin setting up the mannequin she used for instruction in the center of the hut where her healing lessons took place and thinking about the lesson for her beginner class. The girls would arrive not long afterwards, their chatter, giggles, and yawns filtering in from the entrance. After getting settled, they would begin. Every now and again her group of girls would change. She would receive a new student, or one of her students would be considered competent enough to begin work with the more advanced classes in the healing huts. Usually when that happened, a girl would come to Yugoda to inform her that the day’s lesson would be her last, since she was now engaged and would have to focus on mastering women’s work and managing her new household. The loss of students would be melancholy, the gain more joyful.

The mood of this particular morning… would be hard to describe. Certainly not sad. A happy mood, but not a joyful one per se. The correct word would probably be “curious”.

The students’ chatter filtered in at the same time she did.

“…and then, she ended up freezing his boots together while Tanaraq knocked him over. Master Pakku managed to make a big cloud of snow and by the time they cleared it he’d tunneled away under the doors… but he left his boots behind! The next day, he finally let them in, and they’ve been his students ever since!” Kirima announced as she wandered in. 

Her best friend Silla trailed after her. “Your sister is so cool! I wanna kick Pakku’s butt so he’ll teach me waterbending like Nuvua.”

“Silly Silla, we can’t do it yet,” Kirima gave Silla an affectionate shove after they sat down. “We have to wait til we’re big enough and we learn to heal. We need to know how to put him back together once we’re done. _Then_ we’ll kick his butt.”

Yugoda held back a laugh. She almost wished Pakku had been there to see the proud smiles on their faces- his own face probably would’ve looked pretty funny after hearing that.

“They weren’t let in because they got into fights with him all the time,” Asha sighed as she walked in. It was clear that the twelve-year-old had been trying to explain this to the nine-year-olds many times without success. “There’s more to it than that. He let them in because they showed him just how much they wanted to learn.” She rolled her eyes as she plopped down on the right side of the two girls. She’d been a little more agitated lately and seemed like she had a little less patience for reviewing old concepts or for some of the younger girls around her. As the oldest girl there and with her current level of mastery, Yugoda knew she would probably speak to Asha about moving up to the other healing huts in the next two weeks. There were still some lessons she needed to learn, but those were dwindling more and more.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” piped up little Tapeesa as she skipped in. The six-and-a-half-year-old looked up at Asha. “Tanaraq said she asked Master Pakku first and he said no, and Mama says asking like that was already telling him she wanted to learn. He didn’t let them in until after she and Nuvua fighted him a lot. So of _course_ Kirima and Silla have to fight him!”

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” Asha groaned.

The last three girls behind Tapeesa filtered in, as did one more person. They were much taller than the others and quickly sat in the back corner, scrunched up with their hood surrounding their face and making sure nobody could see it.

Yugoda wouldn’t recognize the person at all if not for the blue-stained polar leopard tail hanging from the collar. She knew that polar leopard tail. Her great-niece, an apprentice dyer, had been carrying a rather large bucket of horseshoe crab-swan blood-based dye when she tripped and a certain waterbender she had a crush on caught her. Even so, a quarter of the dye had still sloshed on the poor boy’s head and dripped down his neck. Her poor great-niece had managed to save the rest of the jacket by dyeing it a darker color, but the collar had not been able to be saved. Yugoda remembered the poor girl’s mortification as she had told her family the story, and how sweet Anik had refused to let her pay for a new coat, saying that the pattern on the collar only made his coat all the more special.

Yugoda watched the figure angle his body a little bit more away from the light coming in the hut’s entrance. She quickly turned her eyes away from the figure in the back corner and clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention.

“It is wonderful to see all of you this morning. Before we get started, Silla, dear, could you shift a little to the left?”

“Umm, okay, but how come?” The girl asked as she scooted into Kirima’s side. Kirima shifted to the left to get more room, as did Asha, as did the girl next to her, and soon enough there was a sizeable gap to Silla’s right. A few girls kept giving peeks to the figure in the back who now had an unobstructed roof.

“There was a little bit of snow the other night that, due to the wind, piled on the section of the roof right above you. I’ve been worried that it would collapse and give someone a bit of a cold welcome instead of a warm one. I keep meaning to ask one of Pakku’s boys to fix it, but often enough things are so busy here that I forget until it’s already past sundown.”

A few girls chuckled at Yugoda’s “cold welcome” joke. Asha raised her eyebrows, but did not comment that the roof had looked the same for the past week.

“To begin, I wanted to go a little bit more back to basics.” Yugoda smiled at the girls. “You are all developing your skills wonderfully, and I’m sure that all of you would make wonderful healers and wonderful teachers someday.” The older girls smiled, while the younger ones puffed up with pride.

“This brings me to today’s question: think about if you were teaching a new healer. What are some of the most important things to know or remember about healing? I’m talking about what you think the most important rules are, any misconceptions an untrained healer might have, and anything you feel would be important to know right away.”

The figure in the corner straightened up a little.

“Oh! Oh!” Tapeesa waved her small hand in the air, almost bouncing in her seat. She barely waited for Yugoda to give her an encouraging nod before blurting out, “Dumping a bucket of water on the patient won’t solve anything!”

The other girls started giggling and Yugoda herself had to hold back chuckles. “Very true, doing something like that would be a little bit more likely to cause hypothermia, especially if the water isn’t heated properly. Let’s expand on that thought, though. How can we relate this back to healing, especially related to using our abilities as benders?”

“It’s kind of like what Tapeesa said. I think she was thinking about what you said on the first day of class,” a girl named Qadira volunteered. “Lots of people think that healing is just about putting water in your hands, waiting for it to glow, and touching people, but it’s not. It’s all about knowing chi paths. When the body is hurt, those paths are damaged. What _we_ do is bring healthier chi, healthier _energy_ , back into those areas and remind the body that it wants to heal. Since it takes energy to heal, by redirecting energy into the wounded areas, we can give the body what it needs to start the process and make everything go faster.”

The figure in the back had scooted a little bit closer to hear the girl’s explanation, and Yugoda could see their head tilting a little to the side. It reminded her of her brother back when they were kids- whenever she surprised him he cocked his head just like that.

“Excellently put, Qadira,” Yugoda replied. “A beautiful speech, covering almost everything I tell any new students. I almost wish I had written it down.” 

“Hey, I have a question,” said Asha. “Generally injuries hurt over a long period of time as they heal, sometimes even a long time after the fact. How come healing doesn’t bring out any of that pain? Why does it feel good even though we’re asking so much of the body?”

“I’m glad you asked, Asha,” Yugoda answered, “because that’s actually what today’s lesson is. We’ve been talking about moving positive chi- moving that chi is what helps us heal- but that negative chi, which is riddled with pain, is still there. With our bending, we can also move that negative chi, and if we’re careful, as we move the blocks and build-ups we can disperse it in the positive chi in such small amounts that it can hardly be felt. That’s how we keep our patients’ pain from overwhelming them. Let me show you what I mean.”

Yugoda demonstrated on the mannequin in front of her and quickly started having the girls go up one by one to try. As she corrected Kirima’s movements, (“Almost, it needs to be a little bit more smoothly. Can you show me again?”) Tapeesa turned to Silla and tugged on her sleeve. “Hey, Silla?”

Silla jerked her head away from her right shoulder and leaned down to hear Tapeesa better.

“Yeah?”

“How come Yugoda hasn’t said anything to the weird person in the corner? She’s acting like she normally does. Are they invisible?”

The figure in the corner scrunched up and scooted further back toward the wall.

“No,” Silla laughed. “But I’ll bet he wishes he was.”

“You mean the weirdo is a _boy?!_ ” Tapeesa shouted. All eyes went to Tapeesa. Yugoda and Kirima stopped abruptly and Yugoda stared at Tapeesa with a frown on her face.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Tapeesa mumbled. Yugoda stared at her cautiously for a few more seconds before complimenting Kirima, sending her back, and calling another girl up to try next.

Tapeesa waited until the two were settled before she turned back to the girls near her.

“Why’s he here, though?” she whispered.

Qadira turned toward the girl with a small smile. “Do you remember how we were talking at the start of class about Tanaraq and Nuvua and what they did to study with the boys?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” she jerked her head in the boy’s direction. “ _He_ is our Tanaraq-Nuvua. He came here to learn, just like those two went to Master Pakku.”

“But I still don’t get it,” Tapeesa pouted. “If he came here to learn he should be yelling at Yugoda to teach him and trying to fight her like Tanaraq and Nuvua, not sitting there doing nothing.”

“If you don’t get it now, just wait a few years and you will,” sighed Asha. “Now would you stop already? _Some_ of us actually came here to learn instead of shout and distract people.”

“Hey-”

“Tapeesa,” Yugoda called. The girls looked up. “It’s your turn to try. Come join me up front.”

A few minutes later, just as things had settled down and Tapeesa seemed like she was just starting to finally get the hang of the new technique, a voice drifted in through the entrance, “Yugoda? Are you there?”

“Yes, dear. Come on in. Can I help you with something?”

In walked Tanaraq, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I’ve been all over the plaza because a certain someone decided to ditch Master Pakku this morning. I came here on the off chance he might be sick or something, just figured I’d ask-” Tanaraq had looked up while speaking and stopped abruptly as she spotted the figure in the back corner.  
The figure sat up stiffly, and the hood fell off of his head, revealing a face with wide eyes and an anxious frown.  
Tanaraq grinned almost as widely as she had when Pakku agreed to teach her. She ran to the boy in the corner, grabbed his forearm, and started tugging him toward the exit. 

“Ooh, I can’t _wait_ to tell everyone where you’ve been- !”

“Tanaraq,” Yugoda called. The girl stumbled to a stop halfway out of the hut.

“I just wanted to say that it was lovely to see you this morning. Usually I see you at night during my advanced class, but we’ve all been missing you lately. I understand the excitement of learning a new skill, and I know that you have a lot to catch up on, but make sure you aren’t neglecting the skills you already have and have worked so hard to develop.”

“Yes, Yugoda,” Tanaraq nodded, her face a little bit more serious.

“On a brighter note, I would still love to see you even if for a brief visit. You know,” her voice took on a slightly different tone, a little overly innocent. “My classes and the healing huts keep me so busy that some days I don’t usually see many other people. I know in about seven hours I’ll be two doors down doing inventory, like I do every week around the same time. It’s pretty long, lonely work. I’m always happy to have visitors keep me company, whether they’re my students or not. I leave the time open for extra tutoring sometimes, too.”

Behind Tanaraq, Anik’s face had lost a bit of its anxiety. His eyes were pensive, and his lips shifted a little in thought.

“Will do. Bye, Yugoda! Need to get back to class with this one!” With a few quick movements, Tanaraq had the both of them sliding away on a sheet of ice, Anik letting out a few panicked yelps at their speed.

__________________________

Yugoda was just trying to reach a pot on the top shelf when she heard some footsteps approaching behind her and an arm grabbed the pot from above her head and handed it down to her.

“Thank you, Anik,” she said before turning around.

“H-hello, Healer Yugoda,” Anik bowed. “Please teach me.”

Yugoda walked over to the boy, helped him straighten up, and beamed as she looked in his eyes and whispered, “Of course.”


End file.
